mr. neugebauer: thank you, chairman. as i was listening to the gentleman, i was wondering if he was talking about the amendment that he had actually offered because actually he's making the case that i've stood up to make today. let me tell what you this amendment would do it. would exclude scientific information published solely in the internal interior department publications from the definition of best available science. which would allow the department of interior to avoid transparency requirements, section 2 of the bill, which requires that the data used by the federal agencies for endangered species act listing decisions be made publicly available and accessible through the internet. so what the gentleman was saying is that this -- the -- they cooked the books, they cooked the information and he doesn't want that to be made available. so here we are making important decisions about potential taking of people's land, spending millions of dollars in mitigation for what may be false science. this gentleman's amendment

mr. neugebauer: i thank the gentleman. mr. chairman, i rise today in strong support of h.r. 43 15, the 21st century endangered species transparency act. i also want to thank chairman hastings for all the work that he's done on this issue and i also want to thank him for inviting me to be part of the e.s.a. working group and for including my bill, h.r. 4317, the state, tribal, local species recovery act in the final version of this bill. you know, in the 19th district, we've been facing a lot of these issues with the endangered species act. we had the prairie chicken, we had the sage lizard and some of the areas dealing with minnows. but one of the things this bill does, and part of the bill i introduced is something that's very simple and straightforward and very common sense and that is, we need to make sure before we make some of these decisions that we have the facts. now, that's kind of a novel idea, when we have a lawsuit, everybody gets to present the facts. and so what we're saying and when we begin to go down the road

mr. neugebauer: thank you, mr. speaker. i appreciate chairman smith's support of this legislation as well as ms. johnson, ranking member. i rise in support today of h.r. 1786, the national wind storm impact reduction program. this is an important piece of legislation because what we know is that tornadoes and tornadic type winds have caused huge amounts of -- amounts of destruction and loss of life in our country. last year alone there were 1,300 recorded tornadoes in our country, causing over 70 deaths and 1,500 injuries. these storms not only cost live bus they also damage property archast year alone, or the s about $400 million a year, except in 2011 when we saw a bad year and the damage was over $28 billion. natural t just a disaster. i had an opportunity firsthand to find out exactly how devastating these tornadoes can be because in my hometown of lubbock, texas, a tornado ripped through our community and killed 26 of our citizens. it was an area, fortunately i was not injured, but it's an area i lived in at the time a

mr. neugebauer. >> thank you, mr. chairman. thank you, administrator, for being here this morning. obviously this rule has caused, you know, quite a bit of controversy and particularly in a lot of uncertainty with my farmers and ranchers, i've received letters from both the farm bureau and local chamber of commerce in my district. i'm very concerned about the mixed signals they're hearing from when they read the rule and what the administration is saying. i want to read this part. the proposed rule states that all waters in a floodplain are regulated unless specifically excluded. now, there are a limited number of exclusions for ponds that are used only for stock watering, irrigation, settling basins or rice growing but there aren't any exclusions, for example, of standing water in a field, rainwater, puddles, backwards, wet spots or ponds that have other uses. now, i know that administrator stoner has in her blog indicated that water in fields, ponds, rainwater are excluded from a regulation under this rule. and i think that's also repeated on the epa website. but i think what we